New Law Lets Courts Decide If You Are a Sensitive Enough Parent

A new law in Great Britain could
criminalize normal parenting—the kind practice by people who are
not perfect every single second of every day. The so-called
“Cinderella Law” expands the definition of child cruelty to include
any form of “emotional, psychological or intangible harm,” writes
barrister Jon Holbrook in SpikedOnline:

Under the amended offence it will be possible for a
parent to be convicted of: smacking a child; not providing it with
regular meals; leaving a crying baby alone on the petrol forecourt
while visiting the station checkout; even ignoring teenage
angst. Indeed, the wayward and emotionally fragile teenager,
not to mention the teenager who dislikes his parents’ style of
parenting, should have little difficulty making a case for his
parents to be prosecuted. Defenders of the new law may guffaw at
these examples, and claim that such prosecutions could never
happen, but they are wrong.

Holbrook goes on to describe a few cases of parents arrested for
such everyday “crimes,” including Tom Haines, a dad who let his
two-year-old wait in the car for 10 minutes while he ran into the
store. He was convicted of child cruelty:

Fortunately, Tim Haines had his conviction overturned
on appeal after the Crown Court judge, on hearing what Haines had
done, asked the question: ‘Is that supposed to be a crime?’ It
ought to have been obvious that Haines did not treat his daughter
in a criminal way. Yet it clearly was not obvious to either the
police who arrested him, the Crown Prosecution Service that
prosecuted him or the judge in the magistrates’ court who convicted
him.

And that was before the Cinderella Law. That’s why
we should not allow the definition of “cruelty” to expand any
further. It’s already stretched too far.

Until recent times, child
cruelty was always understood as physical harm—beating,
starving, molesting. Things that parents did that were outright
wrong and directly resulted in pain. When we start arresting
parents for something that could go wrong, in the
very worst case scenario—”What if the child is snatched from the
car?”—no parent is safe. And that’s doubly true if the courts
resort to conjecture about the psychological impact of a parenting
style they disdain: “What if the child doesn’t feel nurtured
enough?” Does forgetting to put a love note in a child’s lunch
trigger a police investigation?

The state shouldn’t decide how to parent.

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